POL Greener and Safer Advantages

POL – A More Protected and Environmentally Sustainable Strategy for Data Centres

The AXIS Technical Services fibre-based connection system provides an eco-friendly networking solution to traditional copper wiring. Overall, AXISTECH’s Passive Optical LAN advantages ranging from price-efficiency to reliability, but none of these benefits are quite as underappreciated as the environmental sustainability of fibre optic cabling. Future-oriented, energy-efficient measures implemented today will have a tremendous impact in the mid-term future; consequently, sustainability has become the new frontier of corporate innovation.

Consider a data centre, of which there are hundreds of thousands globally. It takes approximately 2,450,000,000 watts of electricity annually to power one of these centres, which is the equivalent of the yearly electrical output of three nuclear power plants. Most of the data centres, however, use copper wiring as their primary source of circulating electricity.

The Greener and Safer Advantage:

Optical Fibres Cut Power Consumption by up to 60%

Removal of Copper and Plastic Reduces the use of Non-Renewable Materials

Fibre Optic Cable Installation Augments Space Availability by 50%

Elimination of Plastic Wires Provides a Non-Flammable Alternative

If you compare the power consumption of a 10-gigabit Ethernet copper connection with that of an optical fibre, you will find a difference of 24 watts in power consumption to the disadvantage of the copper. This, with the additional 10 watts of power to cool the copper, makes for 34 watts of additional power being used per 10-gigabit connection link.

While this may not seem excessive, there are thousands of these links and for every 14 copper cables that are switched to the AXISTECH fibre optic links, 4100 watts are being saved per hour; the equivalent to the average annual power consumption of a four-person household.

The manufacturing of the cables also has a significantly smaller carbon footprint than that of copper. Twenty-four 10-gigabit copper cables with an average link length of 41.5 metres require 33 kilos of copper, and each of these kilograms requires 500 kilos of natural resources to be extracted from the ground.

The same number of connections could be made using fibre optics requiring only 58 grams of glass, and using a mere 0.6% of the amount of natural resources per kilogram. Ultimately, the sooner the switch to fibre optics, the sooner the positive action towards a more sustainable earth for future generations begins.